Web 2.0

The application is irrelvent

We get confused when building applications; the technology should be incidental to delivering the experience, it should be the means rather than the end. Sadly both IT and marketeers usually don’t see it this way.

I was recently working with a telco who were running a campaign for a single application that sits on a Symbian phone and gives the user access to all their mobile services (rather than having to access them individually via the mobile web). This is not unusual, organisations marketing the technology rather than the benefit or the experience. The technology should be incidental to what you are selling.

It is hard to put it better than what Duncan Cragg writes

“What most people want on their mobiles is not the applications, but the stuff they animate.

People only accept the concept of applications (whether a native app or a Web app) because that’s all they’ve been offered, and it’s largely good enough. But no-one actually wants to download and launch and register and log in to a local find-your-friends application – they just want to find their friends in the area – now! And they shouldn’t then have to flip between the find-your-friends map owned by that application and the restaurant review map owned by another.

They don’t want Facebook videos and YouTube videos and phone videos. They just want to share videos. They shouldn’t have to think about whether to send a picture by MMS or to use an upload app, after remembering the login. They don’t want multiple ways of sending messages: IM, SMS, Twitter, Facebook, etc. They shouldn’t have to think about how to tell their friends about some news item – whether to post a TinyURL link on Twitter or copy the text manually into Facebook.

They only want one shared calendar, not the phone calendar and a Google calendar and events on Upcoming.org, that need two more logins. They shouldn’t have to think about how to synchronise music or contacts lists on the phone, the iPod, the PC, some memory card and online. “

He goes on to introduce the ‘U-Web’ Mobile 2.0 platform. This is exciting stuff and well worth a read. The challenge is not just about the IT industry getting excited about U-Web, the drive needs to also come from marketeers focussing upon “what” experience they want the customer to enjoy rather than “how” it will be delivered. They shouldn’t be distracted by the application that the experience will be delivered through, they should focus on delighting the customer and driving value to the organisation.

Web 2.0 is far from dead

Web 2.0 is anything but dead. The term is no longer necessary as its concepts become ubiquitous.

So Web 2.0 is in terminal decline according to this TechCrunch article. The basis of this statement is anecdotal and from Google Trends which show a declining use of the term ‘Web 2.0’ in google searches. This tells us nothing, indeed I’d almost suggest that it is an indication of the health of Web 2.0. As it becomes ubiquitous people no-longer need to use the term. Do a similar trend search for ‘eCommerce’ and you will see a similar decline in that term and no-one is suggesting that business on the internet is in decline.

Web 2.0 was always a catch-all term for a number of concepts. If you look at ‘social media‘ in Google Insights you will see that term on an upward trajectory (interestingly the area that is driving the greatest worldwide search traffic for that term is Singapore – anything to do with the Power of Influence?) Web2.0 as a term may be in decline, but everything it stands for – community, rich interactivity, new business models – I don’t see these things dying.

Are you listening to your customers?

Dear CxO,

Looking for free market research and customer intelligence? Look no further than Twitter.

You may not care about social networking, you may think that Web 2.0 is not relevant to your business. But that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t care what your customers are saying. You may choose to ignore it, but people are out there talking about you; praising you, foul-mouthing you. Go to Twitter Search, type in your company name and see what your customers really think of you.

What is the story?

One of the problems with IT development is that it is tactical and piecemeal in its approach. Functionality is added in response to competitor or broader market activity. Expect to see an increasing number of brands doing something ‘social’ (and tactical) on the web, but don’t expect these new initiatives to be (strategic) seamlessly integrated into the existing digital channel offering.

This piecemeal approach extends to larger initiatives as well. In refreshing the website or developing new digital channels such as mobile and TV, IT will typically build out features and functionality prioritised upon their perceived individual business value regardless of what the sum value of the proposed release is. (Focusing all your effort of building functionality that delivers to your bottom line will seldom be as successful as you predict if it is not supported by features that meet the customers needs).

So when it comes to thinking about new features and functionality, where’s the best place to start? I’d suggest collaboratively, thinking around the customer. Collaboration is important to ensure that everyone starts with the same vision. It needs to be shared it with the broader audience, the product teams, IT; anyone whose day to life life will be touched by the project when it starts. I’d argue that you cannot start this soon enough. You don’t need to spend time doing analysis, interviewing all stakeholders individually, coming up with a document that is circulated and reviewed and re-written (with all the delays and waste that such a process incurs). Start the process getting all those stakeholders off-site for an afternoon and get the thoughts out on the table.

Commence with a presentation that introduces thinking in terms of customers and customer journeys. The below SlideShare presentation does this for the airline industry, addressing a new customer experience across channels. I acknowledge that it is pretty simple and doesn’t touch on half the ideas that airline executives may have. That is the point, it is just enough to get people thinking about different customer types and their touchpoints without getting bogged down in detail. This is what we want the participants of the off-site to share.

[slideshare id=912224&doc=airline-deck1-1231817842408345-3&w=425]

Once we’ve been through the presentation we break out into small groups a, each taking an individual customer (or persona) and build up a story; a day in the life of… (It is important not to forget the internal users of the system). These breakouts last 15-20 minutes with ten minutes for the team to play back their findings. As they build out a richer picture of the customer interactions they are asked to sketch out what the user interfaces may look like. The process is rapid, intense and iterative, but always focussing upon the customer journey; how will the customer realise their goals. When the teams tell their stories an analyst captures the essence of the requirements on index cards. The final exercise is to lay all these cards on the table and ask the team to group them into similar areas then prioritise them according to their perceived importance. In an afternoon you will have achieved four things. Firstly, you will have captured a vision for the new product in less than a day, with all stakeholders understanding not only the vision itself, but also the process that developed it and the concerns and issues that different parts of the business have with it. Secondly you will have an initial prioritised roadmap for its development. This will change, but it is a good strawman to circulate. Thirdly you will have introduced all the stakeholders together – projects succeed or fail based upon the strength of relationships and getting people engaged from the start will go a long way to creating shared ownership. And finally you will have generated energy, engagement and traction; to do the business case and to get the project started, recognising that just one part of the business having a vision is not going to bring it to the life that they dream.

Beginners guide to social networking

So Jeremiah Owyang is on Twitter Hiatus as he evaluates how he uses social technologies. One of the tools he points to is FriendFeed. FriendFeed certainly aggregates your on-line social activity, but I’m still not sure. One of the things I think that such a tool needs to be is in your face, front of wallet and FriendFeed just doesn’t do it for me. Give me time and I may change my mind.

Here’s a question, if you were starting afresh, or wanted to get on the Web 2.0 boat, where would you start? I know more than a handful of people who consider it to be little more than FaceBook and they want nothing to do with that.  They don’t want to dredge up old and lost friends and acquaintances from school and past lives, they are old and lost for a reason thank-you very much. But there is more to social networking than Facebook. Here’s where I would start, not just with a bunch of tools, but also the reason why you should use them. (As I re-read this, it seems a bit noddy, very little is ‘new’ here, but not everyone knows this stuff and you have to start somewhere). I’d welcome comments, suggestions…

iGoogle

Ten years ago ‘portals’ were all the rage, in fact they’ve never really gone away. Trouble with them was they were always ‘walled gardens’ giving you a portal into what that website wanted to see, not what you wanted. iGoogle enables you to bring together in one place all the information that is relevant or important to you. OK, so this one is not social networking, but it is a useful tool that will start you on the road to being a Web 2.0 zealot.

Why: A homepage that is truly flexible, bringing together (‘mashing up’) information from multiple sources.

Alternative: netvibes or pageflakes and take a look at WidgetBox for widgets that you can mash into your new homepage.

Google reader

We’ll assume that content is interesting to you, you are not just using the web to transact. We will assume that timely content is also important. Rather than visiting individual websites to read content, you can take the content as a feed. When you start reading blogs, the number of sites you would visit will dramatically increase. So rather than all that clicking, an RSS reader enables you to aggregate all those feeds into one place. It also enables you to categorize and manage them. With iGoogle you can display your feeds on your homepage, and using google gears you can do this off-line as well.

Why: A single place to read articles (news, blogs etc)

Alternative: Is there one?

LinkedIn

Following the assumption that ‘fun’ social networking is out of scope (many would argue that there is more to FaceBook than Fun Wall, puerile quiz’s and sending friends garbage). LinkedIn is a professional networking site. The cynics would say it is all about ego, to see how many connections you can acquire, that may be true, but it can also be a useful tool for keeping abreast with your industry.

Why: Guy Kawasaki provides a number of compelling reasons, my top two would be that “By adding connections, you increase the likelihood that people will see your profile first when they’re searching for someone to hire or do business with” and “People with more than twenty connections are thirty-four times more likely to be approached with a job opportunity than people with less than five.” In the current economic climate that is a pretty good reason to be on LinkedIn.

Alternative: Plaxo does some of this, and also has some handy address book features, but I’m not convinced. Linkedin gets my money.

Twitter

Twitter was starting to get big in 2008, in 2009 it will be the next FaceBook. Your elderly relatives will have heard of it. Just because it it big does not mean you should use it though. firstly what is it. AKA ‘micro-blogging’ it enables you to publish your status in 140 characters or less. Your status can then be ‘consumed’ by people who subscribe to it, either on twitter itself, on the mobile phone, or as a feed, for example on iGoogle. If you use FaceBook you can synchronize your Twitter status to FaceBook.

Twitter enables you to keep you your colleagues/ contacts up to date on what you/ they are doing. “But I don’t care what they are doing / I don’t want everyone to know what I am up to”. That is one way of looking at it, but think about the times when you have been trying to get hold of a colleague, only to reach the answer phone or have no response to your emails. If she had updated her Twitter status – “Downtown at client meeting” you would know. Or maybe you subscribe to one of your customers, they tweet “Sending out RFP”, you know. Once you start using Twitter the value should become apparent. The challenge is filtering the noise, but of course there are tools out there to help you.

Why: Rather than sending emails (that lack context or won’t be read) on what you are doing, (e.g. I’m out of the office), publish your status on Twitter. People who follow you will be kept abreast of what you are doing. By following your colleagues and ‘luminaries’ you can prevent duplication of effort (because you know that someone else is doing it as per their ‘tweet’) or learn what the masters in the field are doing.

Alternative: Yammer. This is great for internal use within the enterprise, enabling you to microblog in a closed environment rather than to the world outside your company

Instant messenger

Let’s not forget IM as a social networking tool. Instant messenger applications enable you to ‘ping’ people you are connected to, sending and receiving messages. Which IM tool you use depends upon your social group and what they use, but it might be yahoo, messenger or Skype (which also has the advantage of being primarily a voice service as well). If you cannot access the aplication (for example at work) then you can use meebo as a web aggregator to access your IM accounts. With multiple accounts use Trillian or Adium to aggregate them into one place.

Why: Immediate bite-sized communication for when a phone call is not possible or required.

Delicious

What do you do when you find a website that you like? Chances are you bookmark it. Delicious addresses two issues with bookmarks, firstly that they are bowser specific. You use your browser on your machine to store them. This is not much use if you have more than one computer; you can’t access the bookmarks on your work computer when you are at home. The second issue is that bookmarks can only be saved within a file structure (if you are organising them at all). As you start to bookmark an increasing number of pages, managing the volume becomes harder. Delicious enables you to store your bookmarks ‘on the cloud’, meaning they are accessible on any machine. When you save a bookmark you can tag it – potentially with multiple tags to increase findability (delicious will also suggest tags based upon the page content or how other people have tagged the page). The Social part of delicious is in its ability to see who else has bookmarked that page. What use is that? It helps you find people who bookmark similar items, and by adding them to your network you will find more relevant information.

Why: Store and manage your bookmarks (the webpages you like) on the internet, not on your browser. Find similar pages from people with similar interests to yourself.

Alternative: Digg and Stumbleupon. These are more social in their outlook, when you visit a site that you think is ‘cool’ you can digg it. Visit the Digg website and you’ll find what’s popular out there. Assuming you are agnostic towards social networking, there’s definite utility in delicious that you may not find in Digg

Take a look at…

For our social neworking agnostic, that is probably enough to start with. They are the ‘must have an account withs’. There are a number of other networking sites that I’d say ‘take a look at’ but you don’t need to sign-up.

YouTube: The future of TV? (Alternative – Vimeo).

SlideShare: People sharing their powerpoint presentations. Chances are that you’ll find something that will enlighten and teach you something new.

Videojug: If Slideshare is about sharing ideas and learning through presentations, VideoJug does it through video.

Flickr: So you may not be quite ready to share your family snaps with the world, but there’s some pretty good photography out there. Alternatively Picassa, a google product that has a great application that manages your photos on your windows machine and enables you to share them on the web. Of course if you use FaceBook you may as well use that for sharing your photos.

Pandora: This is your radio, but if you can’t access Pandora there’s last.fm or imeem which is more social in their nature.

Why you should care about twitter

Motrin, a US healthcare company put on their home page a large video advert with the basic premise that mothers who carry their babies are likely to get back ache and their pain killers are right for the job. Nothing wrong with that, however the message was ill-judged “Wearing your baby seems to be in fashion…” going on to “supposedly it’s a real bonding experience”. Oh dear. That ‘s the sort of language that stokes the fire of mothers. There once was a time that they would have complained to each other at the NCT meeting (or whatever the US equivalent is), more recently a few might have blogged about it. But there is overhead in setting up a blog, and you need to think about what you write. Not so for Twitter. Twitter is low cost of entry, instant gossip.

Over the weekend Twitter has been buzzing with mums complaining about Motrin and their ad at #motrinmums. Look at the stats. From nothing to hundreds of negative sentiments in a matter of hours. Over a weekend.

(From Twitscoop)

It will be interesting to see how long before the ad is pulled. Will one person take responsibility, make the right decision (and do the right thing and apologize), or will it be a decision by committee and ultimately hurt the brand?

I started with the title “why you should care about Twitter”. Not so long ago I would talk to people about blogging and its importance to the enterprise and was told it was not relevant to that persons organisation. I’m surprised at how many CxOs I talk with today either don’t know what Twitter is or don’t seem to care. This is a good wake-up call. (Oh, and I picked this story up on Twitter via Jerimiah).

Are you who you say you are?

I set this website up in 2001 to record the overland trip Lindsey and I took to India. I wrote my diary entries (I’d not heard of the word “blog” at the time) onto my palm pilot and uploaded my notes in internet cafes when we found them. I called the site “dancingmago” for reasons that are not so clear to me now, (in the early nineties I’d spent a year living, working and studying in Calcutta and had grown rather partial to mangoes and the name stuck with me). With social networking sites popping up all over the place, it only seemed right to register myself as Dancingmango. So I’ve got a pretty good claim to the username “dancingmango”.

However. On the web it doesn’t quite work like that. There’s only so many sites I can claim my username as my own. On the web it is first come, first served. It seems that I am not the only dancingmango. Nor am I the only Marc McNeill (the guy who supports Rangers on Bebo is definitely not me!)

The point of this is that in the social web of the web, are you who say you are? Which dancingmango is me? Which Marc McNeill is me? This wouldn’t really matter, but I read that one in five employers use social networks in the hiring process. This is inevitable (I’m hiring in Hong Kong and will Google prospective candidates), but I’d be concerned if it was used as part of the screening process. Excluding someone because they have the same real name or the same user name is clearly wrong. It is hard to see a solution; but if you are looking for a job, make sure that you have photographs associated with your social presence, and if there are multiple ‘you’s out there, ensure that you are distinctively you to prevent mistaken identity.

Front of wallet

Credit card companies talk about “front of wallet”. With customers having a number of cards at their disposal, how does a credit card issuer ensure that their card is the customer’s card of choice; the card they will pull out first because it is at the front of the customer’s wallet?

How do you make sure that your website is “front of wallet”? One solution is to become the wallet. In Web 1.0 many organisations tried this, branding themselves as “portals” trying to be a one stop shop to do everything. The reality was that people liked to “jam jar” their experiences. They didn’t trust one one provider who did one thing well to sell them unrelated products; that just didn’t fit in their mental jam jar. They buy insurance from an insurance site, cars from a car site. So if they wanted to buy a car they would go to Autotrader. It was not a banks place to offer car sales in their portal offering. (The value proposition to the bank of course looked good on PowerPoint, sell people cars on the banks portal web and there was a ripe market for cross selling finance and insurance at the same time).

Web 2.0 brings a new “portal” to the playground. A concept rather than a product. Thus we have iGoogle and netvibes and mash-ups. No company can become the wallet, they must resign themselves to being the cards inside. They can do this by offering rss feeds and widgets. Making their content and functionality promiscuous, divorcing it from their site and allowing the customer to consume it how and when they want it. Sadly the banks have yet to grasp this concept. Their technically savvy customers would love to have their balances and recent transactions displayed on a widget or as a feed. Sadly they listen to the masses and their inherent conservatism prevents them from such offerings, killing it with what-ifs and unfounded security concerns (“what if a husband and wife shared the home computer and the wife saw suspicious transactions…” yawn).

Anyway, so there’s Twitter. I’ve signed up to it and for a long time it just sat there I had a subscription, but out of sight and out of mind. It wasn’t at the front of my wallet. It wasn’t even in my wallet. Until I got round to putting it on iGoogle. Suddenly it is visible to me. I see it every time I log in. I get bothered by the inane, uninteresting tweets that most of the people I follow burble, but I also update my status on it (and it updates my facebook status as well). Twitter is now part of my on-line experience. It is now front of my wallet.

Unlike the banks who I visit periodically to check my balance and pay bills (in-out, no lingering). Now if my bank balance was a feed on iGoogle I’d have more of an interest to drill down into more detail. I could manage my money better. I could establish a better on-line relationship with my bank. If they gave a little away, I’d give them so much more. But for now, they are back of my wallet.

Does enterprise IT know what Google is?

Imagine an investment bank, a trader has a requirement for a tool to screen stocks. The requirement is to select stocks based upon different parameters, so for example find companies with a market capitalisation between a selected range, and a P/E ratio, Dividend Yield and Net Profit Margin between other selected ranges. And maybe the ability to add additional parameters.

Typically the process will be for these requirements to be captured by the Business Analyst who acts as the conduit to the development team. Nowhere is the user interface explicitly referenced – it will almost certainly be articulated in the reality of the current systems; what the BA knows and understands. Despite the iterface being delivered through a browser, the developers are not web developers. Inevitably the finished product will be functionally correct, it meets the requirements, but it will be clunky: select parameters > search > results… because it reflects the requirements as the trader put them “I want to do this and this and this, press a button and get a list back“.

So what are the chances of an internally developed investment bank application looking like Google finance’s Stock Screener? And what would your trader rather have?

Will corporate websites remain spotty teenagers or will they grow up to be beautiful?

In the corporate webspace most design is little more than mediocre. Interaction design has changed little since coporations first realised that this is a channel thery should exploit. Web 2.0 is slowly making in-roads with basic use of Ajax functionality, but there is nothing that is really breaking the mould. Despite its infancy (for most organisations ‘e’ is barely 10 years old, Amazon, the granddaddy of eBuisiness is only 13, born in 1995), conservatism rules; the corporate web is just not growing up. It would be easy to blame the technologists for being risk adverse- for having invested in architectures and frameworks that do not allow innovation. REST and all that declarative goodness may be great, but of little interst if you have invested in a propiertary framework that does not support it. But the business is also responsible for tardy innovation.

It doesn’t know what is possible. A miss-understanding of accesibility clobbers rich interactions; “no javascript” becomes the mantra, despite the guidance being “provide alternatives” and progressive enhancements making basic and rich interactions possible with the same code. And maybe as usability testing becomes the norm, and testing concepts with consumers throughout the product lifecycle is baked into the process, this is acutally the final nail in the creative coffin. Let me explain.

When you are developing new features or propositions it is only right that you should conduct market research, talk to your customers and get feedback to refine your ideas. But sometimes you need to ignore what you are being told and challenge the perceived wisdom. Imagine the scenario; you are developing a social networking site. You recruit a bunch of consumers to participate in user testing sessions. They match the socio-demographic profile of your target audience, they use the internet more than five hours a week. You let them loose on your concept boards and prototype. They like what they see, they like the blogs… but commenting? The feedback is that none of them would leave comments. So what do you do? Kill the commenting on the basis that the users who matched your “average” profile would not use this feature.

I’m not saying that if you are building a conventional, transactional experience; a retail shop, a financial services provider, you should not test the proposition with users that match the target profile. But beware that they will steer your thinking into the realm of the ordinary, the expected and the average. Try testing it with trend setters, gamers, teens, mybe even anti-personas to push the boundries and harvest real innovation insights.

And maybe testing the proposition is not needed at all. But don’t leave the design to the comittee or the accountants. Sometimes it is more important to have a real visionary driving the product development. Apple is a great example of this, no more so than with the iPhone bounce. When you scroll down a list, when you come to the end, the last item “bounces”. Where’s the “business value” in this? Isn’t this gold plating in the extreme? The development of this bounce will not have been for free, it will have come at a cost. This could have been a financial (more development effort) it could have been at the expense of another feature, or it could have been time. In most organisations this would not get get through the design by commitee. Apple can do such great things with their UI because they’ve got a visionary at the helm who understands the importance of good design and is passionate about it, and their customers become to expect it.

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